Chapter VI: Part 6

The leader-follower relationship can depend in part upon just such physical factors. Bill Dominick, who rules three congressional districts in _The Plum Tree_, cows many of his supporters with his huge, ex-prizefighter’s body. Jack London’s Ernest Everhard represents this type with the dross transmuted to gold, for he is “a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche has described.” Hank Martin combines this physical vitality with an oratorical “kindlin’ power” which inspires his supporters. But his appeal is also basic in another way. His theme “Divide the Riches” has an attraction for impoverished back country people which is probably more compelling than personal magnetism. The power of Michael J. Grogan in _Hot Corn Ike_ has a completely economic basis. From city departments and corporations he obtains the green labor tickets which entitle their bearers to jobs. For each ticket Grogan receives a vote. In _All the King’s Men_, Willie Stark’s concern for his people’s welfare is also expressed in direct action, but he explores psychological depths in his constituents unplumbed by other politicians. He jeers at them as “suckers,” “red-necks,” and “hicks,” then allies himself with them as one victimized by the same city politicians. Losing his job because of these city bosses, he had become “symbolically the spokesman for the tongue-tied population of honest men.” His oratory is violent and emotional, full of questions which bring thunderous crowd responses like those of a question-and-answer sermon in a revival meeting. And he buttresses this primitive relationship with tangibles: an overloaded state payroll, new highways, and a magnificent free hospital. But Willie Stark’s appeal is not limited to the unlearned. The intelligent but neurotic Jack Burden works for Willie even while he allows his critical faculties full play. Anne Stanton, a governor’s daughter, becomes Willie’s mistress. Both of these people see in Willie strength where they are weak. To Jack he is a man who lives in and for the present; to Anne he is an embodiment of strength, a man who knows precisely what he wants and is willing to pay the price to get it. Another practitioner of psychology is Councilor Mikulin in _Under Western Eyes_. He enlists Razumov in his service through his faculty for sensing each man’s vulnerability. “It did not matter to him what it was--vanity, despair, love, hate, greed, intelligent pride, or stupid conceit--it was all one to him as long as the man could be made to serve.”

=Political Pathology: Deviates, Martyrs, and Authoritarians=

This topic leads directly to a very curious set of political phenomena. It can be described as political pathology. The line between sanity and madness is just as hazy here as it is in other areas. But one can usually distinguish between one man who is intelligently dedicated to a goal and another who is a fanatic. Dostoyevsky intended that all his revolutionaries should represent very dangerous forms of madness. It is obvious that Kirillov, who believes he can become God by killing himself, is insane. The drunken brute Lebyadkin, like the vicious Pyotr, idolizes Stavrogin as a god, while Stavrogin himself is a complete masochist. Erkel is described as a fanatic who can serve a cause only through one person seen as the expression of it. Shatov recognizes their abnormality. He tells the narrator that they would be lost if Russia were suddenly transformed: “They’d have no one to hate then, no one to curse, nothing to find fault with. There’s nothing in it but an immense animal hatred for Russia which has eaten into their organism.” Even more lethal a fanatic is the terrorist Ch’en Ta Erh in _Man’s Fate_. He nerves himself for his first act of violence in the novel by driving a dagger point into his arm. Later, in a state of exaltation, he stabs a fragment of glass into his thigh to express to his companions the intensity he feels as he proposes that they should throw themselves with their bombs beneath Chiang Kai-shek’s car. Ch’en develops an almost mystical attraction toward death which he finally satisfies by shooting himself when the attempt on Chiang’s life fails. His opposite number is Konig, chief of Chiang’s police. Once tortured by the Communists, he declares “My dignity is to kill them.... I live ... only when I’m killing them.” Several of Conrad’s characters, notably Nikita the assassin in _Under Western Eyes_ and the Professor in _The Secret Agent_, are quite as ready to kill for political reasons. Warren’s Willie Stark has a fanatical bodyguard in Sugar-Boy, a stuttering gnome of a man who combines absolute devotion to Stark with the satisfaction he gets from driving a high-powered car and using a .38 Special revolver.

But the fanatic need not engage in violence. He appears to channel his drives into actions appropriate to the political framework within which he operates. In _The Troubled Air_ Communist Vic Herres calculatedly ruins his old friend Clement Archer. “Because he’s a fanatic,” explains Vic’s wife Nancy, “because he would sacrifice me and Johnny and young Clem and himself and anybody else if he was told it was for the cause....” The political novel also contains examples of the Communist who carries his fanaticism intact with him in his journey from the extreme Left to the far Right. Elsie McCabe and Frederick Newman knowingly perjure themselves before Senator O’Brien’s committee in _Stranger Come Home_. And it is clear that they have made their allegations against Whitehead with the same disregard for truth which they found useful in their years as Party members. Another of the same species as Dostoyevsky’s Erkel and Warren’s Sugar-Boy is Spring’s Jimmy Newboult. “Knighted” by Shawcross with the Peterloo sabre, he precedes him into each rally carrying it aloft. But with his scruples and acute moral sense, Jimmy represents a mid-point between the deadly Ch’en and Marion Crawford’s sugar-and-spice fanatic. Crawford explains noble John Harrington’s lack of zeal in proposing to pining Josephine Thorn in _An American Politician_:

He was a man, she said, who loved an unattainable, fanatic idea
in the first place, and who dearly loved himself as well for his
own fanaticism’s sake. He was a man in whom the heart was crushed,
even annihilated, by his intellect, which he valued far too
highly, and by his vanity, which he dignified into a philosophy of
self-sacrifice.

In _Bread and Wine_ Luigi Murica tells Pietro Spina, “I decided that politics was grotesque--nothing but an artificial struggle between rival degenerates.” His comment may be taken literally as well as figuratively, for political and sexual pathology are combined in the cases of the deviates in these novels. There are enough to fill a textbook of abnormal psychology. The most common is the homosexual who often seeks to achieve through political association the sense of acceptance by his fellows which he feels is denied him by his maladjustment. Such a one is Marcello Clerici in _The Conformist_. Moravia’s detailed treatment virtually gives a case history following a familiar pattern. Marcello’s feeling of abnormality is deepened by a childhood traumatic experience in which he barely escapes assault by a middle-aged man. Marcello marries, but he remains a latent homosexual throughout his life, feeling a frightening desire to submit when he is accosted by an old man in a situation very like the first one. He hopes to achieve conformity through marriage and membership in the Fascist Party. After paving the way for the political murder of a former teacher, he reflects that the success of the regime is needful to him psychologically. “Only in that way,” he thinks, “could what was normally considered an ordinary crime become, instead, a positive step in a necessary direction.” This maladjustment is found on many levels, from that of Communist General Ares in _The Crack in the Column_ to post-adolescent Winthrop Strang in _The Grand Design_. The son of a famous author now deceased, Strang petulantly complains that he is not receiving enough attention from his dominating mother, a well-known newspaper columnist. In what appears to be an attempt to obtain this affection from other sources, he has thrown himself into Communist Party work and an affair with young Mervyn Packett, another Party member who writes for the Negro press. Lee Sarason, who succeeds Buzz Windrip as American dictator in _It Can’t Happen Here_, surrounds himself with strong young members of the Minute Men: “He was either angry with his young friends, and then he whipped them, or he was in a paroxysm of apology to them, and caressed their wounds.” The parallel between Sarason and Nazi Ernst Röhm is completed when he is shot late at night by another American Nazi, Colonel Dewey Haik. Several brusque and mannish women appear in these novels. Lannie Madison in _Barbary Shore_ is a lesbian who has denied herself everything, including love, to work for the Communist Party. Having broken with it, she is now a completely disorganized personality.

One of the most complex deviates is Dostoyevsky’s Nikolay Stavrogin. Although he is capable of heterosexual relationships, he is a pervert who has corrupted a small child and caused her suicide. A sadist, he is also an admitted masochist. In marrying the feeble-minded Marya Lebyadkin he had carried out his idea of “somehow crippling my life in the most repulsive manner possible.” In the long-suppressed chapter of the novel which contains his confession to Bishop Tihon, Stavrogin hears the Bishop tell him: “You are possessed by a desire for martyrdom....” But the “terrible undisguised need of punishment” is emotionally complicated because this compulsion is a “need of the cross in a man who doesn’t believe in the cross--” Stavrogin plays an essentially passive political role since he allows himself to be used by Pyotr. His case represents, however, a combining of abnormalities usually found singly.

One aspect of Stavrogin’s character also appears in men who do not deviate from the norm. Nick Burr in _The Voice of the People_ looks like Lincoln in his towering stature and his “good, strong kind of ugliness.” He prepares himself for his martyrdom by opposing powerful forces in his state, and finally meets it by attempting to halt a lynching. To some, this self-sacrifice carries an almost religious ecstasy. In Moravia’s _The Fancy Dress Party_ Saverio has been ordered to assassinate the dictator of the South American country of Bolivar. He thinks that he now knows what the early Christians must have felt, “the sweet, deep pleasure of sacrificing themselves for the greater good of humanity....” Shaw’s Clement Archer and Shirer’s Raymond Whitehead do not enter into their ordeals with the intention of becoming martyrs. When they are deprived of their primary sources of livelihood, however, this is precisely what they become. In most of the novels there is an awareness of the political value of martyrs, and the Communists, particularly, excel in their manufacture.

If frequency of occurrence were used to determine whether or not a phenomenon is abnormal, perhaps the dictator would have to be classed as normal. Within political systems embodying the principles of representative government, however, he represents a disease just as surely as a group of cells which suddenly start overwhelming their neighbors. The novel displays not only fictitious tyrants, but real ones as well, from Caesar in Wilder’s _The Ides of March_ (1948) to Koestler’s thinly disguised Stalin in _Darkness at Noon_. The authors usually describe how they act and what made them that way. Since _The Ides of March_ uses the diaries and letters of several Roman citizens, the reader learns precisely what Caesar’s contemporaries thought of him and what Caesar thought of himself. In the accounts of his enemies, he is a profligate and pervert, a destroyer of liberty. His own writings reveal him as a man who is cold and self-centered but devoted to Rome and possessed of amazingly catholic and intelligent interests. Trying to free his countrymen from superstition, mythology, and barbarism, he rationalizes his dictatorship on the basis that the people will not assume the duties of self-government. He writes:

But there is no liberty save in responsibility. That I cannot rob
them of because they have not got it.... The Romans have become
skilled in the subtle resources for avoiding the commitment and
the price of political freedom. They have become parasites upon
that freedom which I gladly exercise--my willingness to arrive at a
decision and sustain it--and which I am willing to share with every
man who will assume its burden.

Like Caesar, most authoritarian rulers appear to believe that they are working in the best interests of their people. Most often this is a rationalization of an enormous drive to personal power, but whatever its source it is almost always a component of the totalitarian mentality. Some absolutists, like Stendhal’s Ernesto IV of Parma, make no pretense of extraordinary concern for their subjects. But the modern pattern is for the Duce, Führer, or Father of the People to associate himself with the masses, at least verbally. This is as true of state dictators such as Chuck Crawford, Hank Martin, and Willie Stark as it is of General Arango in _The Fancy Dress Party_. The three Americans also have in common their origins as members of the lower or lower middle class of southern whites. Each starts with a seemingly genuine desire to better the lot of his group. Their careers provide a study of the same infection which attacks the Duke of Omnium, “the poison of place and power and dignity.” And this transition from crusader to sick man gives insight into the process by which dictators are made.

=Men Behind the Scenes=

Another political type which is not quite pathological yet which occupies a position somewhat outside the main stream of normal political activity is that of the silent man, the one who often wields great power but remains nearly concealed from the public. He is found most often in American politics. Major Rann, boss of the Virginia Senate and opponent of Nick Burr in Ellen Glasgow’s _The Voice of the People_, “had never made a speech in his life, but ... he was continually speaking through the mouths of others.” Jethro Bass in _Coniston_ is another silent man, figuratively and literally. This type carried to the extreme is Dan Lurcock in _Revelry_, President-maker, interstate lobbyist, and national salesman of patronage. A European variant of this type is represented by Karl Yundt in _The Secret Agent_. Described as “no man of action,” his function is to goad others into action. This catalytic role is performed by anti-fascist Professor Quadri in _The Conformist_. His specialty is proselytizing the young. Cold and detached, he often channels his converts into actions he knows will be fatal, “desperate actions that could be justified only as part of an extremely long-term plan and that, indeed, necessarily involved a cruel indifference to the value of human life.”

=The Disillusioned=

In _The Age of Longing_ ex-Marxist poet Julien Dellatre asks Hydie Anderson:

Do you remember ‘The Possessed’? They were an enviable crowd of
maniacs. We are the dispossessed--the dispossessed of faith; the
physically or spiritually homeless. A burning fanatic is dangerous;
a burnt-out fanatic is abject.

With these words he speaks for a constantly growing number of former political enthusiasts who have discovered that they had carried not a torch but a club. One is tempted to call this era the Age of Disillusionment. But this would in a sense be an error, for disillusionment is as old as politics. It is always present; only the number of cases varies. The literary list is a long one--Phineas Finn, the Duke of Omnium, Dick Remington, Hilary Vane, Harvey Sayler, Glenn Spotswood, and scores of others. Even the opportunist Shawcross is not immune. Near the end of his career he asks himself if statesmen are not actually “the true pests and cancers of human society.” He thinks that if he could have one wish granted, it would be that politicians would leave all the people alone for fifty years. “We might then have a better world,” he reflects. “We couldn’t have a worse one.”

The modern literature of disillusionment introduces a variation on this old theme. The discontent is localized to one ideology--Communism. Mary McCarthy states one of its basic causes in _The Oasis_ when she says that Will Taub’s “disillusionment with the Movement had sprung largely from its concentration on narrowly nationalistic aims and its abandonment of an insurgent ideology.” In its original use, the term “literature of disillusionment” referred primarily to the body of work of a group of writers who had turned away from Communism. But for the purposes of this study it is just as fruitful to focus on the creations rather than their authors. The best of these novels is unquestionably Koestler’s _Darkness at Noon_. It is outstanding not only as a psychological portrait in depth, but also as an interpretation of an important phenomenon. Rubashov is at once an individual and a mirror of forces at work in modern international politics. His journey has taken him from exalted participation in revolution, through consolidation of its gains, to a final questioning of the worth of the whole agonizing process. But his life has been bound up so completely with the cause that even his final renunciation is tinged with haunting doubt. Lying in his cell, one of the last survivors of the old guard, he is unable to repress it:

The horror which No. 1 emanated, above all consisted in the
possibility that he was in the right, and that all those whom he
had killed had to admit, even with the bullet in the back of their
necks, that he conceivably might be in the right.

Rubashov’s disillusionment springs from the fact that the light has gone out of the revolutionary movement, that what was to become a new paradise has become an old hell. The dictatorship of the proletariat has evolved into the tyranny of No. 1; the new man has grown into a Neanderthaler. Instead of a promised land, Rubashov has returned from his foreign assignments to find a country where factory workers are shot as saboteurs for negligence caused by fatigue. His conclusion that the regime’s error was caused by abandonment of ethical standards is central to the _bouleversement_ he undergoes. But even despite this basic departure from Communist thought, it is important to recognize that he is still a Marxist. He even elaborates the old dialectic in prison with his “theory of the relative maturity of the masses.” His participation in his mock trial emphasizes the ambivalence he feels. One passage explains this behavior and that of some of the men to whom Koestler dedicated the novel:

The best of them kept silent to do a last service to the Party,
by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats--and, besides,
even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience. They were too
deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun
themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and
twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds
of which they accused themselves. There was no way back for them.
Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules
of their strange game. The public expected no swan-song of them.
They had to act according to the textbook, and their part was the
howling of wolves in the night....

Where there is freedom of choice, the disillusioned one follows one of three courses: needing an outlet for the forces which originally took him to the Party, he engages in leftist, non-Stalinist activity; ricocheting violently in the opposite direction, he aligns himself with the extreme Right; or exhausted, he sinks into a melancholy, nostalgia-tinged apathy. Rocco de Donatis throws himself into the struggle of the peasants for land. Frederick Wellman and Elsie McCabe lie with virtuosity in the service of Senator O’Brien. Lannie Madison retreats into neurosis. The causes of the disenchantment vary. Glenn Spotswood makes his break because he is interested in men as men rather than as pawns in a game. Rocco’s point of departure is the discovery of Siberian labor camps. Both of them, however, suffer somewhat the same aftereffects. There is a feeling of loss, the sensation that a platform has been knocked out from under them.

This particular reaction is best portrayed through the creative artists who appear in these novels. Julien Dellatre is one of three ex-Communists who call themselves the Three Ravens Nevermore. A scarred veteran of the Spanish Civil War, he refers to his poems, “Ode to the Cheka,” “Elegy on the Death of a Tractor,” and “The Rape of Surplus Value” as “past asininities.” His renunciation of the Movement is complete, yet his tragedy lies in the fact that he has found nothing to replace it. He has concluded that “Europe is going to the dogs,” that the reason is a turning away from God, a “loss of cosmic consciousness.” Feeling that a new religion is necessary to save twentieth-century man, he lacks a conviction which would permit him to take the final step into faith. The great passion of his life is behind him. In his own comment he has summed himself up: “a burnt-out fanatic is abject.” Another man of letters in the same novel is Leo Leontiev, “Hero of Culture and Joy of the People,” who has come from Russia to France to address an international peace rally. The death of his wife frees him to renounce the regime and find political asylum in France. Psychologically ready to take this step, “he felt as if a whole drugstore of poison were working at [his synapses]--the accumulated toxins of thirty years.” He has become a Hero of Culture by following the Party line in literature rather than his artistic conscience. Free at last, he feels that he must write something truly fine, a vindication of himself that will also be worthy of his wife, whose death he suspects may have been suicide or murder. But he is unable even to write the projected _I Was a Hero of Culture_ for the American publisher who has given him a substantial advance. For him, as for Dellatre, the light had flickered out, and it could not be rekindled.

Some artists, like novelist Bernard Carr and poet Lester Owens in _Yet Other Waters_ manage to rebound, to continue to work creatively. But still they bear psychological scar tissue. Even in the process of preparing to leave the Movement, Bernard Carr suggests from the floor that the Writers Congress be concluded with the singing of “The Internationale.” And he is moved as he sings. An allied phenomenon is that of the individual who is inwardly in conflict with the Party but remains with it through a fear of these consequences. When Bernard tells frustrated poet Sam Leventhal that he should leave the Party, Sam turns pale. “Bernie, the Party is my life,” he replies. “It would be spiritual death for me outside the Party.” An even more revealing answer is made by British physicist Lord Edwards. When Leontiev asks him why he stays, Edwards replies: “I told you there is nothing else. You will soon find that out yourself. Besides--once you’ve invested all your capital in a firm, you don’t withdraw it--not at our age, not after thirty years.”

=The Role of Woman=

When women engage in political activity in these novels they are usually cast in one of four roles: man’s guide, the reformer, the dedicated Communist, or the patriot. In the years before suffrage was extended to women, one of the few opportunities afforded them for engaging in political activity was to influence or guide a man who was politically active. Emily Harkness performs this function for Jerome Garwood in _The 13th District_. At the beginning of his career he is her intellectual protégé as she channels his reading and thinking. His rejection of this relationship is coupled with his political degeneration and ruin. In _Hot Corn Ike_ Molly McMurdo counsels Mike Grogan with acuteness and insight. Since she is a procuress, she supplies very little moral guidance, but her analyses of the factors at work in the district are penetrating if not intellectual. Peter Ivanovitch, leader of the Geneva revolutionary circle in _Under Western Eyes_, preaches the cult of woman as well as revolution. He had been aided by a woman in making his legendary escape across Siberia. The devotion he felt toward her is also bestowed upon Madame de S----, who contributes not only inspiration but also her chateau to Peter’s activities. Fancying herself another Madame de Staël, this “Egeria of the ‘Russian Mazzini’” appears more like a witch than a prophetess. Possessed of a garishly painted, mask-like face whose outstanding features are extraordinarily brilliant eyes and obviously false teeth, she contributes to one conversation by screaming that they must “spiritualize the discontent.”

The intellectual guide of man par excellence is Ida Wilbur in _A Spoil of Office_. She remains stolid Bradley Talcott’s ideal and teacher even after he has attained the House of Representatives. But she is also an active field worker for the farmers. A pamphleteer and lecturer, she represents the woman reformer who enters into direct action rather than stand once removed from activity. Mrs. Ward’s Marcella acts for herself, but to a lesser degree than DeForest’s Squire Nancy Appleyard and Spring’s three feminists--Lizzie Lightowler, Anne Shawcross, and Pen Muff. Lawyer Nancy Appleyard is a ridiculous figure with her trousers and pistols, but in her feminist agitation she is a precursor of the others. These women are distinguished by conviction, perseverance, and willingness to engage in violent action under pain of brutality and imprisonment to attain their goals.

In strong contrast to Madame de S---- in _Under Western Eyes_ is Sophia Antonovna, an influential veteran revolutionary. A striking woman with her gray-white hair and bright red blouse, she is “the true spirit of destructive revolution.” Shawcross’s daughter-in-law Alice is a direct descendant of Sophia Antonovna. Shortly after her return from Moscow, a letter is published addressed by Zinoviev to the Communists of Britain urging uprisings in the Army and Navy. Implying that Ramsay MacDonald had been pushed into treaties with Russia by Communist pressure, it helps cause the fall of his government. Noting the time of Alice’s visit and the intensity of her devotion to Communism, Shawcross suspects that she had helped Zinoviev to plan and write the letter. Dos Passos’ militant women Communists such as Jane Sparling throw themselves into Party activities almost more zealously than the men. One of the women in _Yet Other Waters_ might be listed under political pathology as well as here. She is Alice Robertson, a nymphomaniac and frustrated novelist whose regard for her current lover does not prevent her from reporting on him to the Party.

There is no Joan of Arc in these political novels, but in Hemingway’s book one hears about the fiery La Pasionaria, and in _The Age of Longing_ and _Nostromo_ the actions of two women evoke mention of the name of Charlotte Corday. In Conrad’s novel Antonia Avellanos is as fierce a patriot as her father Don José, who had nearly died in inhuman captivity by dictator Guzmán Bento. Her fierce anger against General Montero, a modern Bento, is one of the forces which brings cynical dilettante Don Martin Decoud to throw himself into the struggle which leads to his death. She suggests Charlotte Corday to him, as does Hydie Anderson indirectly to Jules Commanche when she asks that Feyda Nikitin be expelled from France. But Hydie’s patriotism does not have the fire of Antonia’s. She has come to recognize Feyda’s brutality and immorality, but the immediate cause of her action is his humiliation of her which breaks off their affair. This gesture is the first positive one she has made. Up to this point she has seemed about to apply for membership in the Ravens Nevermore. Her disillusionment, like theirs, has come from rejection of a strong and disciplined system which answered all her questions and assuaged all her doubts. Her break with the Roman Catholic Church has left her quite as adrift as Dellatre or his companions. And when her gesture fails, she feels herself slipping back into the old despondency, the craving for sureness, for a set of positive values.

Although treated in lesser detail than the men (except for Hydie), these women offer the reader the same opportunity for intimate acquaintance with people who can become more real than those one meets on the street or in the office. Their reality and complexity vary with the skill of their creators, but one is able to follow their actions and thoughts more closely than those of individuals in “real life.”

chapter seven
Some Conclusions

In some areas of this study only the main outlines have been sketched in. Good books have probably been omitted, particularly in European literatures. Some mediocre ones, especially American novels, have been included. This was done to give some idea of the development of this form in the United States, but with the fervent hope that a gain in historical continuity would not produce too great a loss through exclusion of more quality. But if a few major points have emerged, this study has fulfilled its purpose.

The press has always been acknowledged as a major factor in influencing political opinion. A close look at the phenomenal success of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ reveals that the right novel appearing at the critical time can exercise wide and lasting influence. With his freedom to place a quarter of a million words between two covers, the novelist can present more information and achieve more reader involvement than any newspaper using columns of factual accounts, brilliant editorials, and four-color Sunday supplements. The novelist can vie with Gibbon and Macaulay if he chooses, ranging freely from century to century, turning from Caesar to modern man, or from Machiavelli to a politician of the twenty-sixth century. Just as the writer treats the rise and decline of empires, so he portrays the flowering and withering of movement. Evoking the past, the novelist can people it with living beings and bring to life its tensions, its climaxes, its meanings. One can gain some understanding of the factors which make men like one another despite national and cultural factors which differentiate them. Silone’s peasants, like Garland’s farmers, crave enough to keep them sheltered and fed, to give them the feeling that they can work in peace with a feeling of security. One senses differences, however, in political hierarchies. The Prime Ministers of Disraeli and Trollope are masters, but the Presidents of Adams and Ford are badgered servants. There are insights into the small niceties, the little peculiarities that distinguish varying political usages. The American politician’s life is exposed to glaring publicity, but the Englishman is spared unless he is brought to court. In _To Be a Pilgrim_ Tom Wilcher notes that “Gladstone’s missing finger appeared in all caricatures,” but “the newspapers never referred to the continuous drunkenness of Mr. A., a cabinet minister, or to even more scandalous liaisons than Edward’s.”

The novelist is able to hold his subject close or at a distance, and to examine it from any point of the compass. He can slice through the body politic and peel back its layers, stopping to scrutinize the one that interests him. He can follow the early struggles that preceded the English Labourites’ rise to power or trace the collateral decline of the Liberals. Even in his treatment of individuals, he can provide a sense of continuity with men of antiquity by presenting modern Caesars. They may dress differently, talk differently, and get their death wounds with bullets rather than daggers. But they are members of the same tradition, followers of the same principles of political action. Nor is the new man neglected. In a sense, Rubashov, with his gnawing conflicts, is as much a new type as is Gletkin with his mentality which precludes conflict. And, of course, one gets much more than history. Tourgée interlards the Reconstruction story in _Bricks Without Straw_ with analyses of causative factors. In a long passage he elaborates his theory that “the town-meeting--the township system or its equivalent--in the North and South, constituted a difference not less vital and important than that of slavery itself.” Generally the European novelist places more stress upon theory than does the American, but in each literature close examination of causes is hardly ever excluded by concentration upon effects.

The political novel has a well demonstrated vitality as a literary form. The indications are that it will continue to grow. At the same time it will probably display a continuity in the phenomena and ideas it treats. The political novel will continue to chronicle movements. Just as Dostoyevsky and Conrad dealt with Communism’s origins and Koestler and Silone with its schisms and apostates, so other authors will follow its eventual destiny. The minutiae of political experience will provide material just as much as the major facets. One example is the “whitewash,” the investigation which begins with grim determination and implacable intent only to end with confusing or ineffectual conclusions. Such investigations are directed toward election frauds in _Phineas Redux_, the Great Subfluvial Tunnel Road in _Honest John Vane_, and oil lease scandals in _Revelry_. It is also likely that the political novel will treat a wider variety of subjects. Some of the attention which corruption has received, particularly in the American novel, may well be directed toward other aspects of the political process which have so far been explored little or not at all. The love story or love interest will continue to parallel the political story. But there will probably be more novels in which the relationship will be symptomatic of the same drives or needs operative in the political sphere. This is the sort of treatment given the relationship between Hydie and Feyda in _The Age of Longing_. If one interprets the word “love” loosely, this approach may be seen in the description of Nikolay and Marya in _The Possessed_. The latter novel and _The Conformist_ will be followed by more novels in which the author concentrates upon intensive psychological studies of individuals representative of particular political mentalities or groups.

The novel set in the future will probably retain the vitality displayed by such books from the time of Edward Bellamy’s _Looking Backward_ (1888) to Orwell’s _1984_. It is in this area that science fiction may make a contribution to the political novel. Jules Verne’s novels were science fiction, but in the society in which he wrote, his work was likely to remain fiction for some time. Modern technology makes it possible for the best science fiction to achieve a greater relevance, to present what may shortly be fact. The world of the future in modern novels tends more often to be a hell than a utopia. And the space ships, robots, and other electronic devices emphasize the godless, mechanistic aspect of modern society which writers like Orwell and Koestler see in it. The better writers of science fiction use this technique. Ray Bradbury’s _Fahrenheit 451_ (1953), perhaps the best of these novels, portrays a post-atomic war America two decades hence in which technology has been used to kill freedom and make its subjects love their bondage. Guy Montag’s revolt against his role in this society may not be completely believable, but Bradbury’s three-wall television sets and book-burning fire brigades bring home the horror of a possible totalitarian society of the future with an impact matched only by Orwell’s telescreens and Ministry of Love.

The future should bring more political novels than the past because this age is so permeated with politics. The Napoleonic era and the late nineteenth century may have been just as political in their ways as this one, but with modern mass communication media, more people are now involved in and aware of politics than ever before. And, of course, politics has become more complex, more in need of interpretation than ever before. Only a relatively small number of Disraeli’s and Trollope’s novels concentrate on politics. By contrast, most of the output of Koestler and Silone lies within this field. Each good novelist, no matter what his age, finds the particular subject matter which allows his talents freest range. But his material is life, unless, like James Branch Cabell and others, he creates a reflection of life in a special land of his own which never was in time or space. But as life grows more political the novelist must inevitably reflect this fact, even if only casually.

All this means that the reader who wants to learn about political phenomena from the novel will have a greater mass of material to work with than ever. Overall quality will be at least as good as it has been and probably better as proportionately more good novelists work in this genre. All of the fictional histories, analyses, and interpretations will require the same reader value-judgments as ever. Prejudice will still intrude; partisanship will still distort. But these same judgments are necessary, in a measure, when the reader picks up the book of a historian or a political scientist. And the novelist may use all of the tools in their workrooms while he adds to them his own resources--imagination, dramatic form, and the freedom and scope given him by the versatile art of fiction.

Bibliography

AMERICAN NOVELS

ADAMS, HENRY: _Democracy_ (1880). Madeleine Lee goes to Washington
to learn about democracy and government. Disillusioned by its state
and by Senator Ratcliffe.

ADAMS, SAMUEL: _Revelry_ (1926). Fictionalized version of Harding
era’s corruption.

AMSBARRY, MARY ANNE: _Caesar’s Angel_ (1952). Rise and fall of a
tainted young politician who tries to deal with criminal element in
a state adjacent to Illinois.

BRADBURY, RAY: _Fahrenheit 451_ (1953). A book-destroying
Fireman turns against the post-atomic war regime of a horrific,
cultureless, totalitarian United States.

BURNETT, FRANCES HODGSON: _Through One Administration_ (1914).
Innocent Bertha Amory’s husband uses her charm to lobby for his
schemes in late nineteenth-century Washington.

CHURCHILL, WINSTON: _Coniston_ (1906). Jethro Bass’s rise to
control of a New England state through mortgage holdings and
political deals in the post-Jacksonian era.

----: _Mr. Crewe’s Career_ (1908). Twenty years after Bass’s death
the railroads exercise tighter control. Signs of public opinion
being marshalled for action.

COE, CHARLES FRANCIS: _Ashes_ (1952). Contemporary politics and
corruption plus murder.

CRAWFORD, F. MARION: _An American Politician_ (1884). Reformer John
Harrington’s excursion into politics of the late eighties under
Marquis of Queensberry rules.

DEFOREST, JOHN WILLIAM: _Honest John Vane_ (1875). A weak
congressman seduced into corruption by a satanic lobbyist and a
money-hungry wife during Reconstruction.

----: _Playing the Mischief_ (1876). Attractive Josie Murray gets a
fraudulent relief bill passed by a corrupt Congress amidst unsavory
Washingtonians.

DOS PASSOS, JOHN: _Adventures of a Young Man_ (1938). Glenn
Spotswood’s development into Communist organizer and his death for
Trotskyism in the Spanish Civil War.

----: _Number One_ (1943). Huey Long-like Chuck Crawford carries
on as Tyler Spotswood goes to jail for him in atonement for his
collusion in a corrupt career.

----: _The Grand Design_ (1949). Panoramic novel of New Deal
and wartime Washington. Conflicts of personalities, ideals, and
politics--national and international.

ELLISON, RALPH: _The Invisible Man_ (1953). A young Negro’s
crack-up under prejudice in North and South and disillusionment
after whole-souled Communist Work.

FARRELL, JAMES T.: _Yet Other Waters_ (1952). Novelist Bernard Carr
learns that the Communists dictate to artists too, then leaves
despite twinges and “the treatment.”

FORD, JAMES L.: _Hot Corn Ike_ (1923). Local politics with national
implications in two areas of late nineteenth-century New York.

FORD, PAUL LEICESTER: _The Honorable Peter Stirling_ (1894). Poor
Man’s Friend to Governor of New York despite vicissitudes as love
and virtue triumph.

GALLICO, PAUL: _Trial by Terror_ (1952). Blackmail frees an
American conditioned into a robot for a Hungarian spy trial while
American diplomats send notes of protest.

GARLAND, HAMLIN: _A Spoil of Office_ (1897). Iowans Bradley Talcott
and Ida Wilbur fight for the farmers in and out of Congress in the
seventies.

GLASGOW, ELLEN: _The Voice of the People_ (1900). Lincolnesque
Governor Nick Burr fights a corrupt organization and meets his
death in post-Reconstruction Virginia.

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST: _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (1943). Conflict of
ideologies in Spain as anti-Fascist, non-Communist Robert Jordan
dies fighting for what he believes in.

JAMES, HENRY: _The Princess Casamassima_ (1886). Suicide frees
displaced Hyacinth Robinson from serving London revolutionaries
whose cause he no longer supports.

LANCLEY, ADRIA LOCKE: _A Lion Is in the Streets_ (1945). Another
Huey Long novel.

LEWIS, SINCLAIR: _It Can’t Happen Here_ (1936). The horrors of a
Fascist America.

LONDON, JACK: _The Iron Heel_ (1908). America under the Fascist
Oligarchy seen in retrospect from the 26th century when near-Utopia
is well-established.

MCCARTHY, MARY: _The Oasis_ (1949). The founding of a seemingly
successful utopian colony which begins to wither from lack of
feeling of relevance and conviction.

MAILER, NORMAN: _Barbary Shore_ (1951). A special revolutionary
socialism to be saved for “the day” is passed from one to another
of a group of weird characters.

MASTERS, EDGAR LEE: _Children of the Market Place_ (1922). Spirited
biography and defense of Stephen A. Douglas set against a growing
America by a shadowy narrator.

MANCHESTER, WILLIAM: _City of Anger_ (1953). A series of tragedies
growing out of the “numbers racket” and corruption in a city that
looks and sounds like Baltimore.

PHILLIPS, DAVID GRAHAM: _The Plum Tree_ (1905). Harvey Sayler
gains control of a huge lobby and becomes a President-maker before
disillusionment sets in.

RUSSELL, WILLIAM: _A Wind Is Rising_ (1950). On the fringes of
the political novel. Negro sharecroppers dominated by a hostile
socio-political economic system.

SHAW, IRWIN: _The Troubled Air_ (1951). One man crushed between
self-appointed judges and unscrupulous Communists in a fight
against blacklists and guilt by association.

SHELLABARGER, SAMUEL: _Prince of Foxes_ (1947). Running duel of
wits and weapons between Borgia and one of his captains. Melange of
romance, swordplay, and politics.

SHIRER, WILLIAM L.: _Stranger Come Home_ (1954). A radio
commentator and a Foreign Service career man are ruined by Senator
O’Brien and perjured testimony.

SINCLAIR, UPTON: _Oil!_ (1926). The making of a millionaire
radical, son of an oil tycoon destroyed by oil scandals in the
Harding era he helped to create.

----: _Boston_ (1928). Defense of Sacco and Vanzetti with admixture
of fiction.

----: _Presidential Agent_ (1945). Everybody’s confidante, Lanny
Budd helps make and interpret modern political history up to and
through Munich.

STEINBECK, JOHN: _In Dubious Battle_ (1936). A glimpse of Communist
aims and methods in organizing and directing strike violence for
Party purposes.

STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER: _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ (1852). The most
effective political instrument in the history of the novel.

TOURGÉE, ALBION W.: _A Fool’s Errand_ (1879). A Northerner tries
to buck the tide of a resurgent South during Reconstruction. Acute
criticism of the Federal program.

----: _Bricks Without Straw_ (1880). More of the same with greater
violence and more analysis of the political structure of the
pre-war and post-war South.

WARREN, ROBERT PENN: _All the King’s Men_ (1946). The hectic life
and violent death of a Southern dictator with sharp portraits of
his effect upon those around him.

WELLER, GEORGE: _The Crack in the Column_ (1949). An American flier
is introduced to global politics as Communist Greeks fight the
British during World War II.

WHITLOCK, BRAND: _The 13th District_ (1902). The progressive moral
and political decline of a mid-western moth fascinated by the
illuminated capitol dome.

WILDER, THORNTON: _The Ides of March_ (1948). Caesar’s career
through Roman eyes.

ENGLISH NOVELS

CARY, JOYCE: _To Be a Pilgrim_ (1942). Fading Tom Wilcher recreates
turn of the century politics for his niece as he tries to
perpetuate the old solid values.

----: _Prisoner of Grace_ (1952). Chester Nimmo’s 30-year rise from
lay preacher to cabinet minister through determination, astuteness,
and a political sixth sense.

CONRAD, JOSEPH: _Nostromo_ (1904). The rise and fall of Costaguanan
governments with help from a British mine-owner who ends up owned
by his mine.

----: _The Secret Agent_ (1907). Informer Adolf Verloc schemes to
blow up the Greenwich Observatory for a foreign power wanting to
prod the British into repression.

----: _Under Western Eyes_ (1910). A monarchist Russian is
destroyed by chance involvement in revolutionary acts. The work of
Red circles in and out of Russia.

DISRAELI, BENJAMIN: _Coningsby_ (1844). Enlightened nobleman at
last becomes an M.P.

----: _Sybil_ (1845). A less harried Young Englander does the same.
Panorama of England c. 1837-1852 with great popular uprisings
emphasizing national discontent.

----: _Tancred_ (1847). The hero recoils from politics, finding
spiritual and political insights amidst comic opera imbroglios in
the deserts of the Holy Land.

ELIOT, GEORGE: _Felix Holt, the Radical_ (1866). Provincial
politics in the 1830s. Gallery of types from the extreme radical to
granite conservative. Complicated plot.

FORSTER, E. M.: _A Passage to India_ (1924). Personal tragedies
emphasize national tragedy of divided and unhappy India governed by
inflexible and unfeeling Britain.

HUXLEY, ALDOUS: _Brave New World_ (1932). A totalitarian world of
the future in which stability has been achieved through destruction
of freedom and the soul.

MAUGHAM, SOMERSET: _Then and Now_ (1946). Niccolo Machiavelli
learns more about his profession negotiating with Borgia. Time out
for dalliance and teaching a novice.

MEREDITH, GEORGE: _Beauchamp’s Career_ (1876). A fiery young
radical’s political excursions end in family disruption, failure,
and death. More portraits of types.

ORWELL, GEORGE: _1984_ (1949). Chilling world of the future in
which the regime can control past and present, literally make two
and two equal five for its slaves.

SPRING, HOWARD: _Fame Is the Spur_ (1940). Over sixty years of
British politics with emphasis on the rise of the Labor Party and
the kinds of men who made it.

TROLLOPE, ANTHONY: _Phineas Finn_ (1869). The education of a young
Liberal in Commons. Disraeli v. Gladstone under other names.
Phineas’s conscience politically expensive.

----: _Phineas Redux_ (1874). More of the same with a murder trial
added.

----: _The Prime Minister_ (1876). The three-year tenure of the
Duke of Omnium’s coalition. The Duke, like Phineas, now infected by
the virus of disillusionment.

WARD, MRS. HUMPHREY: _Marcella_ (1894). Liberals v. Conservatives
as the scales drop from Venturist Marcella’s eyes leading her from
bad Wharton to good Raeburn.

WELLS, H. G.: _The New Machiavelli_ (1910). An illicit affair
destroys Dick Remington as Parnell had been destroyed. Early 20th
century political currents.

ITALIAN NOVELS

MORAVIA, ALBERTO: _The Conformist_ (1951). Marcello Clerici’s
attempt to escape abnormality leads him to a career in the Fascist
secret police and political murder.

----: _The Fancy Dress Party_ (1952). Political and amorous
intrigue involving a South American dictator, his secret police,
and revolutionaries. Ends in murder.

SILONE, IGNAZIO: _Fontamara_ (1934). Growing political awareness
and resistance to Fascism destroy a poor village. Peasants v.
landowners and the regime. An appeal.

----: _Bread and Wine_ (1937). A revolutionary torn between
Communism and religion. Pietro Spina seeks the best of the two
while underground from the Fascists.

----: _A Handful of Blackberries_ (1953). Rocco de Donatis’
post-war break with Communism, his survival of its attack, and his
re-entry into pro-peasant activity.

TADDEI, EZIO: _The Pine Tree and the Mole_ (1945). The top and
bottom strata of Livorno society as Fascism uses the underworld to
aid in its rise to power.

FRENCH NOVELS

MALRAUX, ANDRÉ: _Man’s Fate_ (1934). Attempted Communist coup in
Shanghai in 1927.

SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL: _The Reprieve_ (1945). Many strata of French
society during the ten weeks ending with Munich agreement. Impact
on them and other Europeans.

STENDHAL, MARIE-HENRI: _The Charterhouse of Parma_ (1839). Careers
of Fabrizio del Dongo, his aunt and her lover, Minister to Prince
of Parma in and after Napoleonic era.

GERMAN NOVELS

KAUFMAN, RICHARD: _Heaven Pays No Dividends_ (1951). The rise
and fall of Hitler’s Reich seen through the eyes of a German
reluctantly drawn into Nazism.

KOESTLER, ARTHUR: _Darkness at Noon_ (1941). Superb account of the
destruction of one of the Bolshevik old guard, with penetrating
analysis of his life and conflicts.

----: _The Age of Longing_ (1951). Disillusioned Europeans under
Russia’s threatening shadow await atomic destruction through
conflict of East and West.

RUSSIAN NOVELS

DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR: _The Possessed_ (1872). Deranged
revolutionaries bring destruction and death to a provincial city in
a book meant to show the danger they represent.

TURGENEV, IVAN: _Fathers and Sons_ (1862). Two generations
separated by ideas and ideologies. Nihilist prototype dies
unyielding as his pupil accepts the old order.

SOUTH AFRICAN NOVELS

PATON, ALAN: _Cry, The Beloved Country_ (1948). A poignant double
tragedy arising out of political, economic, and social repression
of the Black population by Whites.

----: _Too Late the Phalarope_ (1953). The personal tragedy of
a hero destroyed by lack of understanding and repressive racial
legislation for white supremacy.

SUGGESTED READING

CROSSMAN, RICHARD (ed.): _The God That Failed_ (1950). Writers
Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis
Fischer, and Stephen Spender discuss the events in their lives
which led them to Communism and the factors which caused them to
break with it. An extremely valuable book.